YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who were former employees of PayPal. The platform is owned by Google. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, YouTube is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively consumed more than one billion hours of video content every day. As of mid-2024, approximately 14.8 billion videos existed on the platform, with uploads occurring at a rate exceeding 500 hours of content per minute.
YouTube's impact on culture and the internet is massive; the platform has influenced popular culture, trends, and created a new class of celebrities. Originally, the idea behind YouTube was to create a platform for ordinary people to share home videos. In November 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Since then, YouTube has expanded beyond its core website to include mobile apps, network television, games, and integration with other platforms. In September 2020, YouTube launched YouTube Shorts, a platform for 15-second videos similar to TikTok.